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Comment by spangry | Hacker News Reader

I hate it when governments do this, and they seem to do it a lot. The socially optimal price is the marginal cost of providing the service. In this case, the marginal cost is essentially 0 so the search should be free. They're leaving welfare gains on the table by setting such a ridiculous price.

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Unfortunately, this is one of the most effective methods of discouraging wanton scraping.

I’m not sure about the laws in Canada, but aren’t these convictions public domain? Presumably someone could just scrape that and build a free API?

> Unfortunately, this is one of the most effective methods of discouraging wanton scraping.

Maybe they could require you to add (and verify) a credit card and then not charge it for fewer than 30 queries a month.

Of course, it's a solution that brings other problems, but it's one way of using payment systems to provide the service and keep it free for everyone but the scrapers.

A simple, pretty much unscrapable system: App on your phone that you use to take a picture of the license. The system returns the current status.

That is far from unscrapable. Could probably be done within hours with the Android emulator.

If you had a picture of the license you could certainly scrape it--but then you're doing it legitimately anyway, no need to scrape. Without a picture of the license it's not going to return anything but an error.

And I’m sure it would be openALPR on the backend, which would gladly parse a dynamically generated “picture” of a license.

They could have just added a captcha.

Ask for name and date of birth. Voila, no scraping.

With the current state of PII leaks, I'm not so sure.

Hmm.. hold my, no wait.. take my beer.

I'd imagine that the socially optimal price is _below_ marginal cost, since it's improving compliance with a law that (I hope) is uncontroversially utility-increasing

Probably don't want tabloid newspapers just checking everyones status regularly

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